Refund scheme is welcomed
NEW Ross Good Shepherd laundry survivor and author of ‘girl in the tunnel’, Maureen Sullivan has welcomed the opening of The Mother-and-Baby Institutions Payment Scheme for applications.
The scheme – which aims to acknowledge the circumstances experienced in mother-and-baby or County Home Institutions in Ireland – will provide financial payments and health supports to those who are eligible.
“I think it’s a good thing. I think these women deserve to be recognised and deserve an apology because terrible things were done in Ireland. We have to face up to it and acknowledge it and only then can we heal,” said Maureen.
She said: “We need to go on from that era, from that terrible dark cloud that shaped Ireland. I know some women’s lives were destroyed.”
Maureen was taken to the laundry in Irishtown from her Carlow home when she was 12 and spent two years there. The facility was one of ten laundries in Ireland. It closed its doors 50 years ago in 1967. After two years in the New Ross laundry, Maureen was moved on to other Magdalene facilities in Athy and Dublin.
She said: “They stole my childhood. They destroyed it. I got no education. Society was just wrong back then; to take a young innocent child to put them working in a laundry. Our lives will never be right. Our lives are destroyed and we will never have peace.”
Parts of the Mother-and-Baby Institutions scheme have been criticised, including the sixmonth stay requirement to ensure that all eligible children, including children who were adopted, boarded out and fostered, were resident in a relevant institution. It is estimated that 24,000 survivors have been excluded from redress.
The Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission and others have said the 180-day period is not an indicator of whether a child suffered harm, such as from the forced separation of mother and child. Similarly, a person must have been resident for 180 days to be entitled to a health support payment or eligible for the provision of health services without charge.
However, many believe those who were resident in an institution for any length of time should be eligible for those supports.
There has also been a call for the removal of the rule excluding mothers accessing the enhanced medical card if they were resident for less than six months.
Questions have also been posed about the number of people that have died since the act was signed into law last year and its enactment.
Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth Roderic O’Gorman has pointed out that under the act, the personal representative of a deceased relevant person, who died on or after 13 January 2021, can apply to the scheme, which was the date of the then Taoiseach’s apology to survivors of these institutions on behalf of the State.
The apology followed the leaking of the Commission of Investigation’s final report into the Mother-and-Baby Institutions to the print media. It caused considerable distress among the survivors and an investigation was conducted into the Taoiseach’s office to establish how it occurred. In response to a parliamentary question submitted by Aontú, the Taoiseach said the internal investigation into the leak of the report was completed in December 2022.